Bombs fail, but damage is widespread

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July 10, 2007|By Tom Teepen Cox News Service

To those of a certain age -- Generation Ex, let's say -- "The Doctors' Plot" recalls the charge by Stalin that a cabal of physicians was scheming to poison Soviet political and military leaders. Before the resulting round-up ran its course in early 1953, scores had been executed or exiled to the gulag.

Stalin died within months, all on his own and without the encouragement of any poison. The whole supposed plot had been a phony, as the new Kremlin leadership quickly conceded.

The physicians arrested were almost all Jewish. The affair had been part of a broad campaign of anti-Semitism, which Stalin had ordered up. Strip off the Soviet surface and, at bottom, you have an old-fashioned Russian pogrom, with the gavel as the weapon of choice.

(Stalin would have been in no danger even if the plot had been real. Paranoid, he had long since quit medical doctors in favor of veterinarians. But a plot by wicked veterinarians would have been a tough sell even to a populace accustomed to being dutifully gulled.)

Now we have another doctors' plot, this one very real. Six immigrant Muslim physicians are under arrest in Britain, another in Australia, dozens more have been questioned and Lord knows how many are being quietly investigated in other nations.

The two car bombs in London, built to kill and to rip large numbers of innocents, in the manner for such enterprises, fizzled. Though it exploded, a hastily assembled third car bomb caused no injuries either, except to the two doctors aboard who rammed it into the Glasgow airport.

But make no mistake. There is wide collateral damage all the same; it's just not physical.

Put aside the relatively few among us who would go after hometown Muslims with torches and ropes if they could. Most in the West have been holding to the proposition that resident Muslims, native or immigrant, are peaceable and that no fog of suspicion should blanket them.

In that, we have abided by the steady and universal counsel of Western political and spiritual leadership.

After all, Islamist terrorists have been mostly young, variously disaffected, indifferently educated, to whom the innate discipline of reason is not second nature, or even third. Muslim, yes, usually Middle Eastern, yet a breed apart.

But what is more reason-driven than medicine? It is rational, pragmatic, empirical: Rigorous cause-and-effect stuff at every turn.

The involvement of physicians in at least two countries -- and the emerging suggestion that an Internet web may lead to even more -- sets off a terrible dissonance, beyond the obvious one of men trained to heal and comfort choosing instead to maim and terrorize.

It's the social dissonance that so wounds.

If physicians can be -- indeed, are -- terrorists, are there then no havens for Muslim and non-Muslim alike from categorical probation? With any hope of brotherhood already reduced to tolerance, and that often uneasy, are we to slip into mutually wary estrangement? May no supposition of innocence stand?

The doctors' car bombs failed. It is not clear that their terrorism did.